"I should let you sleep," I said instead. "It's late there."
"Early, actually. I've been awake for a while."
"Trouble sleeping?"
"Something like that." Another pause. "Vasily? Be careful. Please."
"I'm always careful."
"No, you're not. You're reckless and obsessive and you throw yourself into danger without thinking about what you have to lose." Her voice cracked slightly. "So please. Just this once. Be careful."
I closed my eyes, letting her words wash over me. She was afraid for me. Not of me anymore—for me.
"I will," I promised. "I'll come back to you, Gabrielle. Nothing will stop me."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay. I believe you." She laughed softly, the sound warm despite the distance between us. "I never thought I'd say that. I believe Vasily Chernov."
"Miracles do happen."
"Apparently so." A yawn came through the line. "I should try to sleep. Call me tomorrow?"
"Every night. I promised."
"You did." A pause. "Goodnight, Vasily."
"Goodnight, little dove."
The line went dead, and I sat in the darkness of my penthouse, phone pressed against my ear, listening to the silence where her voice had been.
***
The days bled together after that.
I threw myself into the hunt for the mole, working with Semyon to implement the compartmentalized intelligence strategy. Different information from different sources, each trail carefully marked so we could identify which version Pankratov acted on.
It was tedious work. Patient. The opposite of my instincts, which screamed for action, for violence, for something concrete I could fight.
But the mole was a ghost, and ghosts couldn't be killed with bullets.
Between meetings and strategy sessions, I found my thoughts drifting back to her. Wondering what she was doing at that exact moment. Imagining her in the library, curled up with a book, the Mediterranean light playing across her face. Remembering the way she'd looked in my bed, flushed and breathless, crying out my name.
I called her every night without fail. Sometimes the conversations were brief—check-ins about security, updates onthe Athens acquisition, mundane details of island life. Other times, we talked for hours, the distance between us dissolving in the darkness as we shared things we'd never told anyone else.
She told me about her mother's death when she was nineteen. How her father had given her three days to grieve before demanding she return to her classes, maintain her grades, not let the Blanchard name suffer. How she'd buried her grief so deep she sometimes wondered if she'd ever really processed it at all.
I told her about my father—not the Pakhan, but the man. The one who'd taught me to ride horses at our dacha outside Moscow. Who'd held me after my mother's funeral, the only time I'd ever seen him show emotion. Who'd spent his last years in exile, offering advice I didn't always take but always considered.
We didn't talk about love. Didn't name the thing growing between us across thousands of miles of ocean and air. But it was there, in every call, every shared silence, every moment we spent learning each other's scars.
I was falling.
I knew it, even if I couldn't say it. Even if the word felt too dangerous, too vulnerable, too much like the weakness my father had always warned against.
I was falling for my wife. The woman I'd stalked and kidnapped and forced into marriage. The woman who should hate me might still hate me sometimes, but who called me by my name like it was precious.
